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Thursday, December 30, 2010

Film Just to Wash the Hot Topic Stink of that MXPX Movie Trailer Off You, Here's What It Looks Like When Non-Shitty Musicians Make Non-Shitty Films

Posted by Eric Grandy on Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 3:28 PM

For SIFF this past year, I had the pleasure of screening The Sentimental Engine Slayer, the feature film debut from At the Drive In/Mars Volta's Omar Rodríguez-López (as writer, director, producer, soundtracker, and star—sheesh). I wrote this review of it at the time:

This has all the pedigree of a terrible vanity project—starring and written, directed, produced, and scored by musician Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (guitarist of At the Drive-In and the Mars Volta)—but it’s in fact an impressive debut film from an apparent artistic polymath. Barlam (Rodriguez-Lopez) is an indeterminately young man enduring a delayed coming of age in the druggy, David Lynchian underworld of El Paso, Texas. Barlam might be murdering prostitutes (shades of the mass murders of Ciudad Juarez, which At the Drive-In drew attention to with the video for their 2001 single “Invalid Litter Dept.”). He might be sleeping with his sister. But events unfold out of sequence, the imaginary bleeds into the real, and the effect is entirely disorienting. Adding to the unreality is the ghost of Barlam’s dead mother, some hazy Hispanic-American mysticism, and characters who exist only in the half-life/light of computer screens, as well as Rodriguez-Lopez’s expert use of hallucinatory auditory effects.

I thought this film deserved more attention than it seemed to get, and this too-awful-even-for-yuks MXPX-spawned movie trailer seemed like as good an excuse as any to revisit it. So there you go!

While we're at it, let's have a dance, shall we: